kaddie:
The heavy equipment gets shipped through UPS or motor freight like R&L, Vitran, and I could go on with motor freight shippers. The heavy equipment gets drop shipped from the manufacturer and it depends on what shipping company they use. I however, well, and the shipper never knows which shipping company they will use to drop ship because it depends on the customers state and/or the lowest ship rate. I have one manufacturer that uses 6 different motor freight companies.
I could just set a shipping cost for the heavy equipment. However, it may cost more for one customer, but less for another. I don't want to cheat my customers or my company loose money because I didn't charge enough. Nevermind, this would not work well either.
Perhaps, I will just keep it as it is, not use shipping. The way I'm handling it now, is when a customer submits their order and the shipping cost is $15.01 or more, I email them back with a shipping cost and final total for their approval or cancellation. If their shipping cost is $15.00 or lower, I add the shipping cost and automatically ship their order (no approval needed). It is a headache because their are too many steps and most customer want to place their order, checkout, get a final total (including shipping) and we ship it!!
Their are too many steps and way to much paperwork. I have at least 5 printout pages per order. Some orders are up to 10 pages. I keep everything everything because you never know what a customer may say or do. At least I have my printouts.
Anyways!! I get frustrated and stressed out, can't breathe when it comes to this shipping issue I have.
Ok
now I have a better picture, I should have figured heavy meant freight companies are involved
This can still be done. It will take some work but its not terribly complicated
I assume you deal with a limited number of suppliers for your heavy equipment
Now you don't need to worry about charging freight to the penny, just be very very close.
use a website like https://www.freightcenter.com to get quotes
You will want a quote from the supplier to the geographical center of each of the 47 other states, use a map to help you. Now you know what it costs to ship to the middle of the state but that won't tell you enough maybe, try some other zip codes in the same state. I did a quote for 3 different zip codes that are in totally different ares of maryland :western, central and eastern shore and the prices were all the same. You get the quotes from about 10 carriers you can take the mean, median or the highest price from that as your shipping for that item to that state. The quotes I checked differed from 235 being the lowest to $400 being the highest. But most were around $275.
Then ask you supplier to get you some quotes say 10 or so should be enough to 10 of the zip codes you used on freightcenter.com and see how close they are. Be sure to explain what you are doing, and get as much info from the supplier as possible for each quote, such as who they used, what was the most expensive quote they got from other carriers. If the actual quote the supplier gives you is fairly close to what you came up with you're doing great. You then know how much it is going to cost to ship that item to every state. If the prices you got are no where close to the supplier's actual numbers, use the info you gathered from the supplier. See if the company they quoted you from has a website that gives online quotes, or is on the list from freightcenter.com. You will be able to come up with a price that should cover 99% of all addresses in a particular state for each item from each supplier. Now you may find that some large states such as TX or CA you may need to break up into 2 areas say north and south or east and west , but I see no reason why you couldn't figure out a standard shipping rate per product per state.
Once you have your shipping cost on an item to every state
Set up an attribute for that item called something to the effect of
Shipping Cost (Please choose your State)
Then add as the attribute options every state and assign the shipping cost to that state to the attribute option.
Now a customer adds a piece of heavy equipment to the cart it adds the shipping in as an attribute.
Yes this will take a lot of work based upon how many suppliers and products you have.
Now here's how you set up your cart
you have 2 choices
- Just charge every one a $6.00 HANDLING fee on any order regardless of apparel or equipment or mix of both.
This way is the simplest. No coding needed. Just set up flat rate shipping to charge $6 for each order.
You could modify the module to say Handling Charge instead of Shipping
Option2
if you don't want to charge customers who only buy heavy equipment that $ 6. This will take some coding. Not a lot but some. Searching the forums here will give you most of the code. And most likely most of that code will be posted by Ajeh. I say that because I don't know how to program PHP to save my life. But I have made some serious modifications to my site all based upon posts made by Ajeh
For apparel you use flat rate shipping.
But you will need to modify that module with a simple code that turns it off when only heavy equipment is in the cart,
The easiest way to do this is to set apparel as 1 product type and heavy equipment as a 2nd one
Then the flat rate module checks to see if anything of product type 2(heavy equipmet) is in the cart and no product type 1 if so turns off. other wise as long as there is at least one item from product type 1(apparel) is in the cart it stays on
this next step may not be necessary, I can't think what will happen if you don't do this and just set heavy equipment weight to 0
setup the free shipping model
you want this to work whenever weight is 0
set all heavy equipment to a weight of 0
modify the free shipping module to not display anything in the Shopping cart instead of the normal "FREE SHIPPING"
and there you have a working cart that charges fairly close to the exact right freight on your heavy equipment. Yes you may lose a few dollars on some sales and make a few dollars on freight on others. But this will work if you take the time to calculate the shipping costs ahead of time. You will need to stay up on freight charges. Maybe taking the time once a month to double check some of your quotes and modify your attributes as needed.
But this is the simplest most honest way to do this, that I can think of, alot of work on your part to calculate sipping ahead of time and to keep up with it, but little to no coding needed to do this, no need to call or email your customer back. The customer can add any product to the cart and know the shipping cost all at once and make their payment online.
